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Kendrick Lamar Awarded 2018 Pulitzer Prize for DAMN.

Kendrick Lamar has been awarded the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in Music for DAMN.. The annually awarded prize is for a distinguished musical composition by an American that has had its first performance or recording in the United States during the previous year. This year the award includes a $15,000 cash prize.

WINNER:

DAMN., by Kendrick Lamar

Recording released on April 14, 2017, a virtuosic song collection unified by its vernacular authenticity and rhythmic dynamism that offers affecting vignettes capturing the complexity of modern African-American life.

Premiered on February 2, 2017, at Weill Recital Hall, Carnegie Hall, New York City, a masterwork in a traditional format, the string quartet, that is unconstrained by convention or musical vogues and possesses a rare capacity to stir the heart.

Recording released on March 24, 2017, by The Crossing, a five-movement cantata for chamber choir, electric guitar, and percussion that raises oblique questions about the crosscurrents of power through excerpts from sources as diverse as Supreme Court rulings and ventriloquism textbooks.

The nominating jury for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize, reviewing 186 music entries, included:

Regina Carter, jazz violinist, Maywood, NJ (Chair)
Paul Cremo, dramaturg/director of opera commissioning program, The Metropolitan Opera
Farah Jasmine Griffin, William B. Ransford Professor of English and Comparative Literature and African-American Studies, Columbia University
David Hajdu, music critic, The Nation and professor of journalism, Columbia University
* David Lang, composer, New York City (*Pulitzer Prize Winner)

This year’s recipients constitute the 102nd class of Pulitzer Prize winners. The prizes will be awarded at a lunch on May 30, 2018, at Columbia’s Low Memorial Library.

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Perhaps a more analytic approach ought to have been taken. It is good you present the judges. Often people don’t even wonder as to who the judges behind the prizes. Instead, they open wide and swallow w/o thinking. Often they think somehow the prizes are awarded objectively. And yet that is far, far from reality. Indeed, what might be the prejudices of the judges? Why Lamar and not Van Morrison? Normally, my interest focuses on the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. And indeed most poets just open wide and swallow, bowing to the winners in grand admiration. But the recent Lamar controversy regarding a white fan singing the lyrics for one of his songs attracted me. And indeed I shall be sketching a critical cartoon on the judges and Lamar, and indeed the Columbia Journalism Review will likely NOT publish it. In fact, will this comment be censored?

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